I have a complicated relationship with Payday. I loved the first game after playing through the PS3 demo dozens of times as a kid, and took that love straight into Payday 2. I enjoyed the many hours I spent busting open bank vaults and waiting for faulty drills, but console players were stuck with an inferior version of the game that was constantly outshined by the PC release. Considering how much I enjoyed the base game, it left a sour taste in my mouth and made me apprehensive about the third game.
My virtual bank-robbing career might have ended years ago, but just like Dallas, Hoxton and the gang, it didn’t take much to pull me out of retirement for Payday 3. I recently hit up the Starbreeze offices for four hours, taking on two new heists across several difficulty modes, getting an extended look at the game's customisation systems, and finding out that six years away from a series will make you incredibly rusty.
Updated July 7, 2023: We've updated this preview of Payday 3 to include our very own video featuring George Foster and Eric Switzer discussing how promising this latest entry in the bank heisting series is. It comes complete with footage of the upcoming game.
Despite some lingering questions about the full release, I’m happy to report that almost every change that Payday 3 makes is a positive one. There seems to be a lot of trepidation from the community but even after just four hours, I can say that Payday has never felt better to play.
The first heist we jumped into, which was heavily featured in the Xbox Showcase gameplay trailer, was exactly what you picture when you imagine Payday, and followed the gang as they robbed a New York bank in broad daylight. You’ve got thermite to collect, money to find, and cameras to avoid. If you’ve played First World Bank from the first two games, you know exactly what to expect; it’s Payday, pure and simple.
Starting off with such a classic Payday experience highlighted just how much the core mechanics have improved. I might have just been too used to the less smooth console release but all of the guns feel a lot more satisfying and crunchy to hit headshots with, while also having smoother aiming. The new traversal features, like being able to vault, clamber, and slide, are an even bigger improvement that makes moving around the map a lot more fluid. Payday 2 was already fast-paced, but these changes dial things up to 11.
Stealth has the biggest mechanical change. In previous games, heists could be completed quietly by very skilled players, but it was a tough task not many were capable of, especially in a group. Payday 3 gives you more options while unmasked and makes stealth easier by adding a new Hitman-like “searching” behaviour to guards, letting you leave a private area without being shot if you’ve been spotted. Linger outside for long enough and you can try again, meaning that a single mistake doesn’t turn every level into a bloodbath.
Even if going stealthy is a much more viable option now, that doesn’t make it easy. My crew and I agreed to go in stealthily at the start of every attempt, and we never managed it once, only ever making it a little bit of the way through before the inevitable police shitstorm began. But still, much like trying to clear No Mercy quietly in the first game, having a carefully-crafted plan go to hell can be just as fun as going in all guns blazing.
There’s nothing like Payday when you’re being attacked from all sides and desperately trying to get through objectives, secure the money, and escape. Payday 3 does have hostage negotiation this time around, letting you trade tied-up civilians for more time and resources, which is an interesting new layer to contend with, but I didn’t find it helped all that much when playing on Normal and Hard difficulties. I’m sure it’ll be necessary on Death Sentence, though.
While the first heist gave me that pure Payday experience that I’d been missing, the second level was a different story altogether. This heist was more reminiscent of the second game’s Art Gallery, taking place at night while we robbed a fancy museum of its paintings and statues. As you can imagine, this meant that stealth played a more important role, with Mission Impossible-esque laser wires lighting most of the rooms up like a disco ball.
The main gimmick setting it apart from the Art Gallery heist is that we had to find QR codes from phones dotted around the museum to open up different exhibits containing the paintings the gang is after. We then had to identify which piece of artwork was the real one by using a spectrograph, before hacking into the security with a flash drive that was hidden in the map. Combine that with the heavy police reinforcement and the helicopter waiting on the rooftop, and it’s quite a lot all at once.
After going through both heists on Normal and Hard several times, I ended up preferring the first level for its classic Payday-ness, but I also really appreciated what the second one was trying to do by shaking things up. In typical Payday fashion, playing through them several times just felt like scratching the surface, especially after finding out that you can pull the blinds down in the first level to be more stealthy.
There are lots of things we still don’t know about Payday 3, though. Other kinds of heists await us and we don’t even know how many there’ll be in the base game, while my look at the customisation systems and the in-game market was difficult to gauge thanks to having near-limitless money. It might be a slog to grind up the dough to get fancy cosmetics, or it could be as easy as it was in Payday 2.
We’ll need to wait for the full release to find out those answers, but my time with Payday 3 left me confident about the game’s future and itching for more. Payday’s bones have never been stronger, so it’s going to be up to the meat of the experience to carry it through to greatness.